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Powerlessness and Pretense

By Masha Gessen December 30, 2013 12:27 pmDecember 30, 2013 12:27 pm

MOSCOW — Within two hours of a deadly bombing Sunday at the main railroad station in Volgograd, officials announced that they had identified the female suicide bomber. A name, a photo and a biography spread from news agency to news agency; law enforcement supplied journalists with details, including the tidbit that she had been married to two different Chechen rebel fighters, both now dead.

According to investigators, her severed head was found at the scene, among the remains of the 16 people she had killed. Russians did what anyone would do in this situation: They typed in the name of the killer and studied her social-network accounts. These came alive quickly, with the following announcement on Vkontakte, the most popular Russian social network: “Dear Russians, I don’t understand why you are writing all sorts of weirdness to me. I am alive and well and didn’t commit any acts of terror. Leave me alone.”

That may or may not have been the woman investigators had in mind, but any hope that officials would shed much light on the identity of the suspect was soon dashed, when investigators announced that the terrorist had in fact been a man. Citing an anonymous law-enforcement source, Russian news agencies said the police had mistakenly fingered a woman who happened to be passing by the scene of the blast.

Then the authorities said the attack may have been perpetrated by a man and a woman. There was even a claim that a metal detector had prevented the woman from taking a more active part in the attack and causing more casualties. Metal detectors were installed at the entrances to airports and railroad stations all over Russia after an explosion at a Moscow airport in 2011; most of the ones I have seen at the stations, though, stand idle and unmanned.

Such communications messes follow almost any major event in Russia. At their root is the lying impulse developed over nearly a century. Since the early days of the Soviet Union, reporting good results was more important than actually achieving them. Even as the Soviet economy stagnated and store shelves went from empty to emptier, television broadcast pictures of plentitude and Soviet leaders congratulated their underlings for increasing production and improving the lives of their fellow citizens. Over time, lying well became an end in itself.

People were rarely penalized for failing to do their jobs; if anything, they were punished for assuming too much responsibility. All that mattered was that they could tell a good story when they reported the imaginary results of their imaginary work.

Over the years that Vladimir Putin has been running Russia, the Soviet combination of powerlessness and pretense has been recreated. Ever-swelling numbers of state employees are afraid to make a move unless directed to do so by a higher-up. But, just like their predecessors, they are finely attuned to expectations and always ready to say whatever they feel the audience is waiting to hear.

They know that if they report that they have identified the terrorist, in time someone else will report that the terrorist’s accomplices have been arrested, and then someone else will announce that the accomplices have been brought to justice — and all together they will move up the career ladder for ostensibly having made the country safer.

They do this every time a bomb goes off in a public place in Russia, which is to say, every few months.